Word: weakland
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...Milwaukee, Archbishop Dolan got generally good marks in a difficult situation. His predecessor, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, was forced out after it was revealed that the archdiocese had paid a $450,000 settlement to a man who claimed that Weakland tried to sexually assault him. Weakland admitted an "inappropriate relationship" but denied abuse. Soon after, Dolan had to parry a mini-revolt among some of Milwaukee's priests, who signed a petition saying celibacy should be optional in the future. Although he was firm in upholding orthodoxy, in this and other cases, Dolan tended to respond without rancor or imperiousness...
...used to be said that in polite society one shouldn't discuss sex or money. But that's no longer possible in the Roman Catholic Church. Just last week Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland acknowledged paying $450,000 in 1998 to settle a claim that two decades ago he sexually assaulted a 30-year-old graduate student. (The Vatican accepted his resignation a day after the revelation.) Add the Weakland settlement to the huge sums other dioceses have paid to cover sex-abuse claims in recent years: an estimated $25 million in Santa Fe, N.M.; nearly $30 million in Boston...
...Weakland, 71 and one of the U.S. episcopate's last unregenerate liberals, his fourth tete-a-tete with John Paul next week may well be his last. Bishops usually retire at 75, and the Pope is unlikely to grant an extension. Made Archbishop by Pope Paul VI at the church's liberal apogee in 1977, Weakland by 1984 induced the Conference of Catholic Bishops to write a pastoral letter calling American poverty a "moral scandal." From then on, almost every year saw a bombshell lobbed at conservatism in general or--so it sometimes seemed--John Paul II in particular. Vatican...
...Recently Weakland has taken time away from work: in 1996 the Juilliard piano graduate toiled on a doctoral dissertation on liturgical chant at Columbia University (leading Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, whose workfare program Weakland had faulted, to snap that the Archbishop should "read his Bible instead of playing piano in New York"). Last year Weakland underwent treatment for prostate cancer. But he is back in combative form, penning a preview of his ad limina thoughts for the Jesuit magazine America. He feels that U.S. Catholicism, 60 million members strong, is in danger of a split. At one extreme, he discerns...
Before leaving for Rome, Weakland told TIME he admires John Paul's character, but suggested a theologian could "find ways of relooking" at the Pope's ban on female priests. He plans to state his fear of a schism "in the context of not wanting the Catholic Church to undergo what has happened to the Jewish community or the Lutherans, where groups seldom talk to each other." Framed that way, the plaint almost obligates John Paul to talk back...